DAILY NEWS: The “Community” Side of Independent Online Content: AtomFilms, Eveo, and AntEye

DAILY NEWS: The "Community" Side of Independent Online Content: AtomFilms, Eveo, and AntEye

DAILY NEWS: The "Community" Side of Independent Online Content: AtomFilms, Eveo, and AntEye

By Eugene Hernandez/indieWIRE

>> The “Community” Side of Independent Online Content: AtomFilms, Eveo, and AntEye

(indieWIRE/4.3.00) — As the online film and video industry emerges, dozensof websites are pursuing sometimes radically different approaches. Popularpioneers IFILM and AtomFilms, for example, are just two Internet outletsthat are changing as competition increases and Hollywood jumps in.

Three new initiatives by three different internet entertainment companiesare aimed at changing the way web-based film and video are created outsidethe Hollywood system. AtomFilms.com, a leader in online — nextgeneration — entertainment, is announcing its plans today, while two newsites — Eveo.com and AntEye.com — are launching with slightly differentmodels.

Dubbed a “community-powered entertainment platform,” Seattle-basedAtomFilms’ effort — MogulMaker — will give Atom site visitors theopportunity to “evaluate, package, and green-light” new projects that Atomwill produce. In a conversation with indieWIRE, AtomFilms Director of WebEntertainment Scott Roesch indicated that the effort is a contrast to Atom’s“user-submitted content” approach of the past year — a model which resultedin more than 20,000 shorts being submitted to the site since it launched.Now, with 700,000 registered “Atom Insiders,” the company is not abandoningits approach, but it is moving to include viewer feedback and incorporatingits Insiders into the production process. MogulMaker will include a selectgroup of Insiders in developing projects with Atom filmmakers. They willthen allow all visitors to evaluate pitches and vote on the project thatgets the “green-light” for production by Atom.

Similarly, a new site by the name of AntEye.com (read “anti-dotcom”) isaimed at changing the way that entertainment is created. The company willproduce pilots and digital films in partnership with site visitors. In aconversation with indieWIRE, AntEye.com CEO Matt Leshem described his siteas “the Geocities for video” and indicated that in kicking off its site, thecompany will create six pilots with six makers from six different cities —Atlanta, Austin, Kansas City, Madison, Seattle and Toronto.

Leshem’s goal is to invest in people outside of New York and Los Angeles asdevelopers of programming that he intends to sell back to Hollywood, withthe help of site visitors. AntEye will finance the six original pilots,selected from the video samples submitted by site visitors in each city andvoted on by site viewers, with budgets of up to $100,000 each.

It will also finance digital films with budgets up to $250,000 each. Thefunded pilots — in one of six categories: Action, Animation, Comedy,Documentary, Drama, Erotica, Miscellaneous, Music, Point of View,and Sports — will be announced on April 15th.

“You create the content,” the AntEye.com site which launched on Fridayproclaims, “You control the content.”

Declaring that “everyone’s a director,” a new site named Eveo.com launchestoday intending to “revolutionize” entertainment “by empowering individualsto produce and premiere compelling, real life and creative short videos.”In a conversation with indieWIRE, San Francisco-based Eveo CEO OlivierZitoun explained that the new site is posting short work — dubbed “eveos”— from anyone, especially students and aspiring makers. This is how hedistinguishes his site from those such as AtomFilms. Zitoun believes thatthe increasing availability of digital cameras and digital editing toolswill change the entertainment business and affect the movies that Hollywoodcreates.

“The company is strategically positioned at the convergence of several globalmarket trends: the democratization of entertainment production, driven bycheap but powerful digital tools, and Internet ubiquity,” according to an Eveoannouncement.

The three-minute Eveos can be submitted on tape, will be screened by sitestaff to avoid inappropriate sexual content, and will be digitized and postedon the site in one of a handful of channels — Travel, Adventure, Extreme,News, True-Life, Music, Weird and Spoofs. The groups of videos will,according to Eveo, “foster the creation of virtual video communities whereviewers and authors can communicate around the same topic of interest,passion, sport or activity.” Rankings and ratings will direct site visitorsto content and Eveo will pursue licensing and syndication deals for selectcontent.

Sites including Pop.com and Nibblebox.com are two other recently announcedoutfits that incorporate similar efforts, while IFILM, a leader in postinguser-submitted content is altering its approach to include greater “businessto business” services and products — witness the recent acquisitions ofLone Eagle Publishing, StudioXchange, and the Hollywood Creative Directory.

“Basically, we don’t see a revolution around consumers being able to submitcontent,” Atom’s Scott Roesch told indieWIRE, “We believe that the realrevolution is around enabling consumers and artists to engage in amarketplace that erodes the once exclusive barriers to the entertainmentindustry. We see what we’re doing as fundamentally changing howentertainment is created, discovered, marketed and distributed. Usersubmitted content is just one piece of the puzzle.”